Word: fictional
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...angrier, cruder objectors to the System. Yet as Arlecq drifts from reflections on jazz music, to two desultory love affairs, to a funeral, to scenes from the failed marriage of a friend, the author manages some artful acts that reveal the writer behind the discontented esthete. Moments of fiction materialize, coolly precise, sharp and fresh as the crinkle of ice that can be skimmed from the edge of a winter puddle. Fries, moreover, can write about love without sounding like a clod or a pornographer...
...alone. His young wife had to remain behind in England. Plagued by chronic asthma, malarial mosquitoes and the tasks of directing 19 native police and supervising roads and drains, Cary would sit down each night by a kerosene lamp and turn out 2,000 to 3,000 words of fiction that he had no confidence would ever see the light of print. He tore up much of it ("I hadn't yet decided what I meant") and worked and reworked one novel, Cock Jarvis, which he never did complete. Eventually, he caught on with some stories for the Saturday...
Joyce Gary saw the novel as Truth, and his prodigious labors in fiction were called forth by a lonely conviction of its high importance. He subscribed to Cardinal Newman's celebrated notion that what the autobiography does for the life of a particular man, the novel must do for mankind. Gary needed every certitude of dedication to sustain a creative career that began late and even so, suffered from early neglect. When he published his first novel in 1932 (at the age of 43), he had already been struggling at his writing for nearly 20 years...
...painter helped him get inside the skin of his most famous creature, the artist-bum Gulley Jimson in The Horse's Mouth. Experience as a British colonial official (from 1914 to 1920 in Nigeria) lent nuances to one of the best portraits of an emergent African in fiction, the black-skinned hero of Gary's fifth book, Mister Johnson...
...sweat over his craft far from the corrupting literary ambience that often sustains but modishly distorts young talent. London was full of Weltschmerz and fashionable reliance on canned Freud and Frazer. Cary was unaffected. Literary myth seekers and archetype spotters will look in vain through Cary's fiction. "My novels point out that the world consists entirely of exceptions," he wrote. Persistently, he saw the world as a struggle between creative man and organized authority, with no quarter given or expected. To tell of human life in terms of anything but spiritual adventure would have seemed...